“Programming is becoming an increasingly important part of scientific research, yet many scientists are self-taught programmers with little formal training. This means that we are often unfamiliar with simple tools that can make programming and dealing with data faster, more reliable and more reproducible. This event is a day-long workshop to develop awareness of the skills and tools that help make computing more efficient and provide results that are less prone to error. If you’ve ever thought “Surely there must be a better way to do this”, then this is the event for you!”

Hopefully there will be a good take-up for this, it’s something we would quite like to have offered ourselves at some point at the BSU. Having taught biologists to program some timeago I know that it is possible to enthuse and encourage non-coders to start grappling with research problems relatively quickly and is the kind of professional development I think most research scientists should consider at some point.